Principal AI Engineer - FrontierOS

About the role

CommBank is hiring a Principal AI Engineer for FrontierOS, a platform that enables people and AI agents to deliver change, operate services, manage risk and continuously improve within clear governance boundaries. The role leads the technical vision, architecture and engineering delivery of FrontierOS, turning it into a practical roadmap and production capabilities, and remains hands-on in critical design and implementation decisions.

Key responsibilities

• Own technical direction and delivery: translate the vision into architecture, priorities and milestones, sequence dependencies, resolve blockers and make trade-offs across functionality, maintainability, reliability, cost and risk.
• Build the Agentic Control Plane: engineer platform policies, human and agent permissions, initiative scope, ownership and approval boundaries, with traceable actions and exceptions routed to accountable owners.
• Connect delivery and assurance through Change.ai: integrate scoping, implementation, testing, risk assessment, release approval, deployment and production operation, with assurance evidence built into delivery.
• Deliver operational capabilities through Agentic HQ: identify control lapses, investigate incidents, propose remediation and support breach reporting, linking incidents to investigation, recovery and verification.
• Enable reusable agents and workflows: develop the Pod Factory and workspace capabilities, with a clear review, approval and versioning path for globally shared agents.
• Establish evaluation and continuous improvement: turn operational feedback and synthetic cases into evaluation datasets, compare against the current version and defined acceptance criteria, with human approval before promoting changes.
• Set the engineering standard: design, implement and review critical components, champion simple interfaces, clear ownership, meaningful behavioural tests, root-cause fixes and dependable CI/CD.
• Own production readiness: establish observability, resilience, performance and cost management, and provide visibility into delivery progress, business outcomes and material risks.
• Develop the team: mentor engineers, strengthen technical judgement and AI-assisted engineering practices, and work with users and stakeholders to adopt the capabilities.

Required profile

• Extensive experience designing and delivering complex software platforms, with sustained hands-on technical leadership.
• Practical experience building production AI applications using agent orchestration, tool integrations, retrieval, context management and evaluation.
• Strong judgement in automated testing, release engineering, observability and production reliability.
• Ability to turn an ambitious product vision into sequenced delivery while keeping architecture coherent and implementation pragmatic.
• A record of improving engineering quality through reviews, mentoring and direct technical contribution.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineers, business leaders and security, risk and governance stakeholders.
• Experience delivering within a regulated enterprise or similarly demanding environment.

Required skills

• Backend services, APIs, modern web applications, cloud infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Engineering permissions, approval workflows, auditability and secure integrations across enterprise systems.

Candidates who are already part of the Commonwealth Bank Group (including Bankwest, x15ventures) must apply through the group's internal application process. The advertising ends on 30 October 2026.